Consumers have many more options for obtaining and reproducing media now than in the past. In particular, portable devices provide multiple options for accessing and playing media, such as audio and video downloads, various types of media from web sites, and so on.
There is also a convergence of personal communications capabilities and multimedia options in a single portable device, such as a cellular telephone, a personal digital assistant, and the like. Increasingly, consumers are accessing and consuming media “on the go” and out-of-home using such portable devices, and as the quality of media presented by such devices is improved, it can be expected that such mobile consumption of media will increase.
These trends in media usage require new techniques for monitoring exposure to media, techniques that will enable data gathering encompassing various types of media and ways of presenting media to consumers.
Dedicated portable monitoring devices have been developed including the hardware and software required to monitor exposure to audio media. It has been proposed to monitor exposure of consumers to audio media by incorporating monitoring software in a cellular telephone, making use of the cellular telephone's hardware, including its microphone, CPU, memory capacity and communications capabilities.
However, since cellular telephones and other personal user appliances are not designed for the purpose of sampling the exposure of consumers to audio media, but rather this is an ancillary function to their basic communications operations, the hardware and operating system of the device cannot necessarily be substituted for that of a dedicated monitoring device without encountering unforeseeable technical problems.